Aukey Rugged Bluetooth Speaker Review

The Aukey Rugged Bluetooth Speaker, is a speaker made for the outdoors – featuring a water resistant design that is also able to withstand drops, but is it any good?

Design

Starting off with design, the design of the Bluetooth speaker is a simplistic and minimal rubber design featuring a piece of string around the product that allows you to attach the speaker to something such as a bag. Four function buttons can be found at the top of the speaker, which allow you to do various standard things such as skipping and rewinding tracks, aswell as allowing you to adjust the volume level of the Bluetooth speaker. On the bottom face of the speaker is where you will find your connectivity options, the speaker has an AUX in as well as a microUSB port for charging the speaker.

Looking a little more at the design itself of the speaker now, the speaker has a general rugged appearance to it. There is some minimal Aukey branding which can be found at the bottom left of the speaker, alongside the two LED indicators found on the speaker. The speakers are hidden behind diamond cut-outs on the faces of the speaker, I think that there is a passive subwoofer which can be found on the back of the speaker to provide more bass, but there is no mention of it on the product manual or webpage. Also, a neat feature of the design itself is that the rubber pokes out on the sides slightly to help the speaker withstand drops.

Sound Quality

Overall, the speaker sounds decent and provides a good sound quality for listening to music. But I had just one problem, I felt like there was far too much emphasis on the treble frequencies – which is a rare thing to happen. It wasn’t something that sounded awful but it was enough to make me notice, so I did some equalizer adjustments in Spotify to reduce the treble frequencies and that made my listening experience much nicer, but I have to say it is quite odd to have a speaker with too much treble.

Despite my issue with the treble balance, the speaker is capable of producing decent low-end frequencies so you won’t have to worry too much about bass and you won’t have to worry about volume either. The speaker is able to get very loud and produce plenty of volume for music listening, but I don’t find myself going over 50% volume – otherwise I find it to be excessively loud.

Battery Life

In regards to battery life, Aukey claims up to 6 hours of playtime at 80% volume – which is a good number of hours and especially at a volume that high. So, battery life is nothing to worry about in regards to this speaker, and you also can charge the speaker back up in around 3-4 hours.

One thing that I do wish is that, like the Aukey wireless earbuds I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, is that I would be able to check the exact battery life on my phone instead of going by the colour of the LED on the speaker – but unfortunately that is not a feature for this speaker.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if you’re someone who needs a small and portable Bluetooth speaker that you can take outside without worrying about it too much – I think this is a great choice. It provides plenty of volume and decent sound quality for the price that it comes in at.